


Needs No Excuses

by Rubynye



Category: The Martian - Andy Weir
Genre: Alternate Universe - Music, Broadway, F/M, Gen, Masturbation, Singing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 04:27:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8875897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rubynye/pseuds/Rubynye
Summary: Three plus one times Mark sang along.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mimssio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimssio/gifts).



> Written for Yuletide 2016 to the most adorable prompt in the history of anything. Thank you for the idea, Mimssio, and I hope you like what I did with it!

0) Mark stops. The solar panel array sits in an angular Jenga pile under his glove-muffled hands, leaning against each other and the collapsed rack he was trying to assemble. He lifts his helmeted head and sweat dislodges from his eyebrows, rolling down into his eyes like tiny stinging bombs. 

"Fuck," he mutters quietly to himself, takes a long deep breath, and stands straight, dragging the heavy-ass surface suit with him. As he leans backwards, stretching the kinks out of his spine, he takes two more seven-eleven breaths, slow and measured against the frustrated pounding of his heart. As he leans back to upright normal he holds his breath to compensate, maybe a little petulantly, just because he can.

He hears humming. Soft deep alto humming.

Behind him, Lewis is fitting together panels of Hab canvas. And also humming. On Mars they'll need the comms to hear each other, but apparently in thick Earth air the suits leak sound. Mark stands there for another few moments, listening, until he thinks he recognizes the tune. And smiles.

***** 

That night after dinner, Mark taps Lewis' elbow, and when she turns to look at him, asks, "Wig in a Box?"

Lewis blinks, that calm blink of hers that conveys her complete faith that her lunatic botanist will make sense, eventually.

"You were humming today," he tells her. "I'm pretty sure I caught "Wig in a Box" from _Hedwig_."

Smoothly poker faced, Lewis replies, "Showtunes, Watney?"

Mark shrugs. " _American Idiot_ 's a hell of a gateway drug."

Lewis looks at him for another couple seconds, another thousand heartbeats. And then she smiles, widening into a grin. 

 

1) Mark stares at the potatoes lined up in front of him. They stare back, even though their 'eyes' are nothing like an animal's light-sensing organs. They stare at him anyway, sunken and beady.

This is going to be a fuck of a lot of work. And it might not even work. The thoughts of dragging in all that soil, making all that water, burying six potatoes and hoping they don't just rot... Mark sits down heavily, his bunk refusing to creak beneath him. Not for the first time it seems like it might just be easier to die.

 _Get up, Watney,_ he thinks firmly, then says it aloud. The sound of his voice sinks into the soft whoosh of air filters and vanishes without an echo. Maybe if he sang it, which would be supremely dorky but whatever works to get him off his ass, to get him up.

_Rise up..._

Mark thinks a moment more, then goes over to Lewis's bin, grabs her data stick, and plugs it in. He flicks through the archived music, the showtunes they shared, her ungodly love of Lerner and Lowe, and then --

 _Miranda, Lin-Manuel_. There's about a thousand songs in this section alone, since old man Miranda's as prolific as he is awesome, but Mark knows which song he needs, set on repeat, loud enough to surround his lone voice with an entire cast and orchestra. "I am not throwin' away my shot" pounds staccato through the Hab, and as he turns around and advances on the potatoes, Mark sings along. 

"I am far from my country, alone, stranded, and hungry, and I'm not throwin' away my shot! So grow-oh-oh-oh-oh, Oh-oh-oh, po-ta-toes...."

 

2) "I'm just saying," pause for emphasis, "we need to keep NASA's public image in mind. The country's public image. The spaceflight community's image." Venkat's scolding rolls across the screen, like he's the Mom Mark doesn't need since he has a perfectly wonderful Mom already, who always got exponentially more mileage out of an eyebrow and five words than Venkat does with his pissy little lectures. 

"I am who I am, buddy," Mark grumbles, staring at the screen and trying to think of a response that doesn't involve expletives and won't get him fired across interplanetary distance. "And what I am needs no excuses..." The showstopper starts playing in his head, in all its sequin-festooned glory, and Mark leans back and sings along with appropriately sweeping gestures, since no one can see him. "Bla-bla-bla-bla-bla, I'm the one on the ground, not all you douches..." 

He mostly sticks to the actual lyrics after that, closing his eyes and envisioning an aging yet gorgeous drag queen, the sere red land outside the rover, the Earth hanging luminous in an endless black velvet void. "It's my life!" he shouts to the ceiling. "And I love each moment and each minute! My life! I'm the one who has to get through, dimwit!" 

The sound ricochets and dies away. At the bottom of his vision, the cursor blinks on the screen. Mark takes a deep breath, rolls his eyes up to the ceiling, and sings, slowly and with increasing feeling, "My, life's, not worth a damn, if I can't sayyyyy, I AM, WHATTTTTTTT, IYYYYYYYY AMMMMMMMMMMM!"

After a breathless moment, Mark adds a few more "Mmmm!"s for emphasis, eases open his eyes, flexes his fingers, and turns back to the screen. "I understand," he types, groaning between his teeth, but hits 'Enter' anyway. 

 

3) Mark stares at the canvas, stretched across what used to be Airlock One.

The canvas ripples back and forth, above the slope of dirt piled against it.

Outside, the Martian wind blows, flapping the canvas, vibrating the Hab.

Inside, the floor's still crunchy underfoot. Mark sprawls across his bunk, one bare foot pressed against the sandy floor, the other up, heel pressed to asscheek. Earlier he prided himself on still being so limber. Earlier, he whacked off twice in a row. Right now, it's late afternoon, thin red light slanting across the outside views, and he's got one arm tucked behind his head and one foot on the floor as he watches the canvas ripple in the wind, as the Hab creaks around him, as he sits here on Mars waiting for his crew to come back for him, or to starve to death, whichever arrives first.

 _Get up, get up,_ Mark thinks lazily on a rising tumble of notes, and doesn't move a millimeter. He can't remember the song or its show, but the tune sounds like disco. The idea of besmirching honest musical theater with disco deflates him that much more, if it's even possible for him to ooze further across the bunk.

Across the Hab, the canvas flaps a little harder. A tiny clump of dirt dislodges from the heap and rolls down the slope, shattering at the bottom into a tiny delta of fragments. Not dust, because it's got enough organic material to glue it together into lumps, even after the Hab breach freeze-dried it. 

Mark hasn't reviewed the footage of his farm since the airlock breach killed it, but now the memory rushes in, the iron tang of damp Martian dirt, a warm red backdrop to his warm green potato plants, cheerful as Christmas. The plants' withered corpses are heaped in a container out behind the Hab where Mark coincidentally never goes, but for a moment he can almost see them around his feet again, high as his knees, leaf-tips brushing his legs as he stepped between the rows.

For just a moment he shuts his eyes, his face crumpling as he remembers sitting with his plants, not being the only living thing on an entire desolate planet. For a moment he remembers creating a little patch of green.

 _Somewhare that's green_ , Mark thinks, and bites his lip, stabbing a spike of pain through his lameass maudlin mood. Fuck maudlin. Rummaging his internal copies of Lewis's files, he picks "Mean Green Mother" from the same show, and thumps to his feet like Audrey II rising up on tendrils to devour the world.

"I'm a mean green mother from outer space," Mark sings as he grabs the broom for another sweep. "And I am bad!"

 

4) "Coming to you from Radio Free _Hermes_ ," Martinez says breezily over the MAV comm, and Mark grins so fiercely his cheeks ache. "Newest ETA, 23:17:42. Or 44."

"Give or take 1300 milliseconds," Vogel puts in, dry as ever. 

_One more day_ , Mark thinks, and opens his mouth, envisions Commander Lewis, and goes for broke. "One day more!" he sings, and listens to Martinez choke with laughter and Johanssen's high pleased noise. "Another day, another destiny, this never ending road to something-y!" That refined little laugh can only be Lewis. "My crew has traveled all this time to see my face another time. One day more!"

"We didn't live until this trip," Johanssen sings, accompanied by several 'ow! no!'s from Beck. "How could we deal with being parted? It's been two years away from home -- C'mon!" she orders, and Mark laughs into his hand, listening to Martinez guffawing in the background as Beck obediently adds his baritone. "And yet with you our world has started!"

Vogel just says, "I have no idea why you're all singing. Space madness, clearly." Lewis laughs more loudly this time.

Because _someone_ has to take Eponine, Mark puts in, "One more day on my own," but Beck and Johanssen are giggling too hard to keep up. "One more night on the red plan-et!" Martinez groans, the little shit. "What a party ship we'll have, once you get me off this rock!"

Lewis says, "I'm not doing Javert," and merely sings "da da da" to his melody, which is a huge disappointment. 

"Awww!" Mark shouts down the comm. "Get Vogel to do the Thenardiers!"

"I'm not French," is Vogel's whole response. Johanssen and Beck keep giggling.

Martinez saves the song with a sturdy, "Tomorrow I'll find out how the MAV flies without a floor!" 

It's the roof actually, but Mark doesn't bother with the correction. He just sings in unison with his crew, even Vogel's gravelly voice echoing down the comm. "One more day! Back to Mars! One day moh-oh-oooooore!"


End file.
